What follows may or may not have actually happened. (I've always wanted to write that at the top of a column.)

I read about a woman who was driving to her son's elementary school for show-and-tell with the boy's pet gerbil in a box on the seat next to her, when the gerbil escaped the box and crawled up the woman's slacks. She slammed on the brakes, jumped out of the car, and began to shake and stomp to get the rodent out of her pants.

A passing motorist, believing he was witnessing a seizure, pulled over and grabbed the agitated woman, hoping his embrace would calm her. She tried to push him away. A pedestrian who saw the struggle assumed an attack was in progress. He ran to the rescue, pulled the man off the woman and punched him in the face.

The gerbil crawled down the woman's leg and ran away.

This story of the gerbil-caused accident is a model of a type of comedy sketch. A psychologist would call it a prime example of inference-observation confusion, a fancy label for people jumping to conclusions without enough information. It's rampant.

Take the story of the Salvadoran fisherman who washed ashore in the Marshall Islands last week, claiming he had been swept away from a Mexican fishing village 13 months ago and had floated 6,000 miles across the southern Pacific Ocean. Nobody I know failed to roll their eyes at the tale: Surely he was lying.

But experts in sea currents say that's about how long the voyage in a small fiberglass boat would take, and so far all of Jose Salvador Alvarenga's story has checked out. Maybe our first impressions were wrong.

It gets more complex when you think of incidents that we're inclined to look at differently because of our own experiences or backgrounds. Take the melee at the bar in Troy two weeks ago, for example. What do you think happened there?

Troy police say they were called when fights inside and outside Kokopellis, on Fourth Street, got out of control, and that they used the force needed to subdue attackers. The bar owner says things had settled down by the time cops arrived, and that it was the officers who created disorder. Video recordings show a cop beating a man on the floor with a club. Some community activists say the incident is the outgrowth of long-standing racism on the Troy police force.

Both the Troy African American Pastoral Alliance and Police Chief John Tedesco (and this newspaper's editorial board) want an independent outside investigation. But some people — who weren't there! — say that's unnecessary, and that they already know what happened. The idea of an outside investigation, one talk radio host said, is "garbage."

What's going on in Troy can be explained by what the sociologist Dorothy Smith calls "standpoint theory," the notion that "what one knows is affected by where one stands in society." Because of varying experiences, no two people have the same exact view, Smith argues, and we can't assume our personal view is right.

So when community activist Abby Lublin asked those attending a community forum on the Kokopellis incident this week to raise their hands if they had been subject to harassment or arrest or physical restraint by police, it's no surprise that in the crowd of people who believe the cops behaved badly at Kokopellis a lot of hands went up. People who have had bad experiences with police are more likely to see police over-reach in what happened; those with family or friends wearing badges, on the other hand, likely figure the cops handled matters pretty well.

A different kind of division is playing out now involving education policy, where we often talk past one another. Almost everybody, it seems, has an opinion about the Common Core standards, a set of goals adopted by 45 states to improve student performance.

People are blaming Common Core for a cluster of pressures in the schools, including excessive standardized testing and a revised scoring system that has shown student performance to be lower than previously thought. But a lot of the folks attacking the Common Core, I'm convinced, haven't actually looked at the standards, or talked with education experts about them. Until we have heard more from a thoughtful review by educators, the calls to abandon the reform are premature.

It's sadly typical of the way public policy decisions often are made: based on limited information transmitted by the loudest voices. That gives rise to responses about as rational as leaping on a guy trying to save a lady from a loose gerbil.

A little humility about what we don't know is an attribute of good citizenship, but it's rare. We jump before we see the gerbil.